Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Arthur Hu, My name is Austin Haskell; I'm a reporter for Real Changein Seattle. I was wondering if you had any opinion on the Universityof Washington's new system for reviewing applications. I know manystrong I-200 supporters believe it is intentionally using race andethnicity to determine admissions, so I was wondering if you couldgive me you opinion on it. My e-mail address is Ahaskell04 yahoo.com

Thanks,Austin HaskellReal Change

Thank you for asking. You might know that I was the one that tookcomplaints from Asian students about alleged quotas in the 80s andfound out that Asians were squeezed at UC when they attempted to raiseminorities without reducing whites, with Asians suffering the onlylosses. That evolved to U California realizing they got more politicalpoints for reducing Whites eventually to even fewer than Asians andembracing a goofy numerical notion of "diversity" of just the rightnumber of blacks and Hispanics, too many Asians and a tiny minority ofwhites, a mix that would have qualified for the federal definition of"segregation" in the 60s.

I200 has been pretty much a joke in UW admissions as numbers ofminorities have been about as high as they've ever been. After I200,Seattle schools came up with 3 finalists to replace John Stanford thatwere 3 black women, which is like a slot machine odds when each blackwoman represents only 5% of the national population ( and she wasdriven out in disgrace)

After Elaine Kim wrote in the PI that the level of diversity was "notacceptable", analysis shows that relative to state population, blacksare 1.37 times BETTER represented than whites, and whites are 1.53(35% less) times LESS than their population. The only over-representedgroup are the Asians, at either 5 times their population, or 8 timesbetter represented than whites.

In 1997, UW law school admitted 42% minority in a state that is lessthan 15% minority, which shows their priorities, though I have notchecked on law and medical schools since. I believe the UW is one ofthe schools that granted preferences to Asian in law school, which isconsistent with fewer Asian practicing lawyers, except that Asians arealready over-represented as law school students

I don't know the details of the "extended reading" which sounds a lotlike how they score the WASL test now, which is a real disaster. Thisis how U Michigan met their quotas when readers were told how closethey were to meeting their "goals" and how many more people theyneeded to pass to get there.

There are two major problems I have with affirmative action. The firstis that the law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, but all"diversity" means is implementing racial quotas and preferences to"match the population" and hand out equal outcomes by affinity group.If that's what you want to do, then just freaking say so and do it.

The second is that the UC Berkeley definition of "diversity" is justcrazy if you just want the correct number of blacks and Hispanics, andignore everybody else. Asians in CA have already reached, and areapproaching in WA the point where we're going to take 40-50% of themost select university spots. Asians and Jews together are 50% or moreof most elite universities, which simply does not allow enough spotsfor everybody else to get their full share. The remainder could besplit evenly among everybody else, but as what happened when everybodybut Asians were protected, when you have Blacks and Hispanics, but notWhites protected from competition with Asians, you'll get the numbersyou see today, with Whites starting to be squeezed out, while otherminorities are effectively guaranteed their full shares.

The response in Malaysia was to have quotas for Chinese and Indians toprotect ethnic Malayans, but even they abandoned that.

I think that rather than trying to compromise between diversity andmerit, we simply banish "diversity" as a goal in and of itself. Ithink we can certainly go beyond strict academics, and that will lowerbarriers for some groups, but it should be without regard to race,gender, or ethnicity, and restricted to advertising and recruiting tocommunities the same way companies like GM Ford and IBM do sometargeted advertising to address affinity groups. I don't have aproblem with "measuring" diversity as long as it doesn't lead toenforcing or defining any set of numbers as right or wrong based onpopulation proportionality.

AP reports that Americans are doing better in math on the NAEPnation test. Blacks are "catching up" with whites. But they don't mentionthat Asians are still leading whites in math, as Asians have in most yearssince 1992. In grade 4, Asians lead whites by about the same margin thatHispanics lead blacks. Asians are equal to whites in reading at both grade4 and 8, on most tests like the SAT, Asians tend to lag in verbal scores,but they appear to be assimilating at these grades, or just studying a lot.

Monday, October 17, 2005

Some observations from the Kirkland Jr High School PTSA meeting: (Lake Washington / Kirkland)

KJH wants WASL scores from the high school broken down by feeder jr high schools. The principal mentioned that WASL scores were disappointing (I think it was lowest of the district jr high schools). The PTSA state convention puts #3 and #4 top items as "alternatives to the WASL test", evidently they still don't have the guts to challenge the beast outright, and "improving math and science education" which unfortunately sounds like they've bought into the fuzzy math and science teaching crowd.

A math teacher didn't give a formal presentation on the new "discovery based" math, however, I looked over the new Algebra books my kids are getting at 7th and 8th grade, it introduces matrix muliplication, and later uses matrices to solve linear equations, something I didn't even do much of in college. For the normal 7th grade track, they are using the 2nd version of Connected Mathematics. It seemed to be a minor improvement over the series we got in 6th grade that had infinite nonsensical homework, and spendng 4 times as many pages to make sure that the one standard method was NOT covered or explained to do averages, or adding or multiplying fractions. I was surprised to find solving for a linear equation, which used to be the culmination of an entire algebra course, covered in all of 2 pages. Just add, subtract, factor or divide both sides, yeah, right. Solving quadratic equations was similarly covered in just two pages.

Compare that to MY 7th grade math worksheet, which was a 8.5 x 11 sheet of 1 digit by 1 digit multiplications, which I completed about 85%, and got 1 or 2 wrong. I wonder how many of these kids who are expected to solve quadratic equations with 2 pages of instruction know how to add fractions with uncommon denominators, or divide a 5 digit by a 3 digit decimal number.

Some parents commented that their students were having big problems with Math Analysis in high school after going through integrated math in middle school. My peek at McDougall Littell was that this curriculum aimed at high school, but offered at middle school level crammed a shot gun ful of college level material concepts all over the place, while providing no instruction in basic arithmetic, nor the old fashioned baby-step per week build up of algebra. I couldn't even FIND how to solve a simple equation like 2 x + 8 = 15 among all the instruction in graphing, statistics, and problem solving.

I don't know if moving from integrated back to to Algebra is better or worse, but so far not too many complaints from my kids and I haven't had to do their homework left.

Parents in LWSD are still pretty much clueless as to the harm of fuzzy new-new math.

OK world, I'm going to take a shot at blogging again. I'll be posting interesting tidbits on Asian Americans, education, and the rest of Humanity, and whatever I find is worth posting to the outside world.